Working with our group has been fun and happy.  Everyone enjoyed working with each other.  We all contributed our best ideas and efforts to all the assignments.  The marks are earned by all the members.  We efficiently utilized Social Medias to keep everyone on track and organized.  Through Facebook, Google Doc and many others, we are able to communicate well without any physical presence and plan ahead.  Good organizations are also essential in our success.  We tried our best to make sure everyone has chances to comment on all the ideas and opinions.  We distributed the work clearly and talked about everyone’s own work together to retain the best quality of the work.  The best of all, everyone is punctual, creative and hardworking individuals and I am satisfied I could work with such an excellent group.

What we could improve on is we should be more creative.  Everything we have done although is based on hard work; we just searched the relevant information up without thinking outside of the box.  Our new marketing strategies were too common in nowadays industry.  Moreover, for every single assignment, we went over space.  We weren’t able to be selective enough to fit all the important information into the required number of pages.  Even for the video, we still put too much content and not being too selective.  Although going over the limit means we have a lot of information, we should really use some examples to demonstrate instead of theoretical stuff.

Anyways, we had a great time and we sometimes had some leisure activities together and we will keep in touch for the future for friendship and networking.

Driving can be treacherous.  Bikes and scooters zip out of nowhere in neighborhoods, distracted people wander into traffic, and stopped cars and speed bumps suddenly appear.  It takes a vigilant driver to avoid catastrophe.  Someday soon, few drivers will have to worry about car crashes and collisions, whether on congested roads or on empty highways, technology companies and car manufacturers are betting.

Volvo, BMW, Audi and Mercedes have announced that they will begin to develop models with sensors and software to allow the car to drive itself up to certain speed.  The sensors and software have functions including monitor the surroundings of a driving car and even track the driver’s physical state.  The systems can offer auditory, visual and mechanical warnings and evasive actions for possible imminent collisions.  It can also take over when the driver is not doing the right thing!

This video is about DARPA competition for driverless cars.  Driverless cars were originally designed for military to reduce casualties.  Now it is being developed for civilian uses.

Many big corporations like General Motor and Google are also thinking about developing such technology.  This technology is able to drive the car itself regardless whether a driver is present.  It can detect the car’s surroundings instantly.  All the driving stress due to extreme weathers, road conditions and emergency situations means completely nothing to a software as it is a huge deal for human beings.  People in the future can have a nap or watch movies when they drive home.

Statistics proved that by having a driverless system, over 2202 lives from 2008 to 2010 were saved. California and Nevada have already pass the laws for legalizing self-driving cars as long as a human being is inside, able to take over(Clark, 2013).

Reference

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/07/29/states-driverless-cars/2595613/

This blog is a reply to EA’s official blog:

http://www.ea.com/ca/news/e3-2013-ea-conference-recap

Electronic Arts Inc. is a leading global interactive entertainment software company. EA develops, publishes, and distributes interactive software worldwide for Internet-connected consoles, personal computers, mobile phones, tablets and social networks.  In terms of EA’s products, we can see they emphasize on both products breadth and depth.  In their recent conference, they announced the releases and progresses of a variety of games.

For breadth, EA started with a few military strategy games as far as I can recall.  Now EA has video games in many different areas like sports, first role shooting and social lives.  EA has been closely incorporating with a lot of dominate sport leagues such as NBA, NFL, NHL to design various sport games for the fans who obsess in these sports and the players.  EA has also expanded into first role shooting games.  EA’s wartime strategy games are great but for the first role shooting games; it is a totally different view of the battlefield which is super engaging.  The most successful game they have ever created would be The Sims series.  The reason is it is a game about a person’s daily life in a simulated world.  The character goes to school, work, dates and everything in real life.  The Sims series made a record about over 100 million sales in the history of video games (Brendan Sinclair, 2010)

While keep developing into new types of games, EA also focuses on bettering their existing games.  For their original strategy games like Command and Conquer, Red Alert and Generals, they creatively implemented a story line in each series while making newer versions from these series.  By doing this, they can attain and retain loyalty from many customers and many consumers such as me who are easily addicted by these attractive games and always expecting the next one.  Every year, EA will come up with sport games for the upcoming sport seasons like this year’s FIFA 14.  The graphics gets better each time and the sport games getting more and more like the real games so customers can surely enjoy and watch their favorite sport at home.  As the technologies advance nowadays, video games only have relatively shorter lives before they become out of date.  However, this is not a problem for EA!

FIFA 14 which is coming out this year, it has improved a lot in many aspects compare to FIFA 13:

I believe EA’s product breadth and depth are one of the best combinations in the world.  By differentiate products like this and define clear positions for them will not only help to attract more customers but also attain their long term loyalties.  Looking into the future, EA is also considering about making games from some famous movies like star wars and moving into the tablets sector at the same time.  These moves will also help in targeting new segments and creating new markets for EA.

Reference:

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/the-sims-turns-10-tops-125-million-units/1100-6249485/